Cargo Records

Two Nice Catholic Boys + The Curse Of Midnight Mary

These two nice Catholic boys, Loren Connors and Jim O'Rourke, met at the crossroads each night during a 1997 European tour. By this time O'Rourke had reissued Connors' seminal heartbreak album In Pittsburgh on his Dexter's Cigar label and was preparing to produce the guitarist's big-band mash-up LP with Alan Licht, Hoffman Estates. Together, Connors-O'Rourke unravel slow motion Venusian style blues to thundering, feedback splattered grooves across three extended pieces.

In 1981 guitarist Loren Connors took his tape recorder to the graveyard where the legendary Midnight Mary's grave lies in New Haven, Conn. The curse is: Anyone who gets caught in her graveyard past midnight will die the next day. But Connors, like a young fool, taped in that place, making this album that was lost and forgotten until uncovered in 2008.

Recorded between Connors’ eight volume Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations LP series and the folk albums he would make with Tom Hanford and Kath Bloom, these nine pieces meld those distinct forms.Connors, singing in a trance like moan, reforms the Mississippi Delta blues on his acoustic guitar with flashes of melodic hooks and a percussive guitar style that erupts into boogie-woogie riffs and other world spirituals. It’s an album for fans of Connors’ solo avant work and colloaborations with Jim O’Rourke or Jandek; and will enthrall devotees of early the 20th Century blues of Blind Willie Johnson and Charlie Patton.

A rare and essential peak into the still mysterious early years of this American guitar master. Recorded March 1981, at the Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, Conneticuit.